The Right to Be Lazy And Other Writings

<b>Now in a new translation, a classic nineteenth-century defense for the cause of idleness by a revolutionary writer and activist (and Karl Marx's son-in law) that reshaped European ideas of labor and production.</b><br><br>Exuberant, provocative, and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880, Paul Lafargue’s <i>The Right to Be Lazy</i> is a call for the workers of the world to unite—and stop working so much! Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law (about whom Marx once said, “If he is a Marxist, then I am clearly not”) wrote his pamphlet on the virtues of laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of leisure, <i>The Right to Be Lazy</i> shifted the course of European thought, going through seventeen editions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue’s other writings—including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of Marx—<i>The Right to Be Lazy</i> reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a “strange madness” consuming human lives.